Your BlueFur web hosting account comes with a great little tool called Softaculous. Softaculous makes it extremely easy for you to deploy hundreds of different applications from WordPress on down to ClipBucket. Now I bet you’re thinking, “What on Earth would I use all of these different tools for?” Today we’re going to explore just that!

Wiki

If you’re familiar with Wikipedia, then you have at least a rough idea of what a wiki is. Basically a wiki is a central repository for user-generated information on any topic. Public wikis include Wikipedia, Wikiquote, WikiTravel, and CookBookWiki. So what if you had your own wiki where you could document something you’re passionate about? Or perhaps something that you and a group of friends are doing, like a group vacation?

Softaculous has four different wiki software available including MediaWiki (which powers Wikipedia), DokuWiki (focused on document creation), PmWiki (focused on project management), and WikkaWiki. With just a few clicks and less than a minute to install, your own wiki could be up and running in no time!

Business

Business software? Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong – there are a lot of great tools available from lots of different companies all over the web to help you run your business. The downside? You have, quite literally, no control over them. You can input your data, you can often get your data back out, but you don’t have control over the web address, you typically have to pay for it on a per user basis, and that free trial runs out pretty quick if you’re not prepared to dive in right away.

Softaculous gives you easy access to 10 different business packages. Software like Vtiger CRM and SugarCRM which allow you to manage inventory, cultivate your customer and vendor relations, and so on. Or OrangeHRM, which gives you free software to manage your staff and their time. Not to mention two different invoicing, accounting, and corporate information management software.

The best part of all the software just mentioned is that they are all free. You need to put time into getting them set up the way you want, as you would with any piece of software that you get to customize at your whim. But there is no upfront cost. And for businesses that want to purchase support for the occasional time they need assistance, most offer paid support as well.

We would love to hear about your experience with Softaculous, and which software you used Softaculous to install!

Welcome to BlueFur’s new blog series: Everyday Solutions! This monthly series will focus on quick and easy solutions for common problems experienced by website owners.

Whether you have a personal or corporate blog, there are two things that really matter: engagement and spam.

One is something you want to increase (engagement), and the other is something no one wants (spam). While many content management systems (CMS) come with a built-in comments feature, or built-in spam reduction capabilities, no CMS includes the measures to achieve the right balance of high engagement with low (or no) spam.

The solution to this problem is actually authenticated comments. Your visitors still have the opportunity to use pseudonyms, which many people value, but those hoping to boost their own profile get a very easy way to authenticate themselves and use their real names.

What is this magical tool that can help solve your conundrum? None other than Disqus.

Allow your visitors to comment using their Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account which makes it much easier for them to engage, instead of registering for an account only for your website.

Disqus lets users choose a pseudonym, allowing them to comment while also protecting their identity, thus increasing engagement.

To cut down on spam, you can require visitors to log in to an account of some kind, whether it’s a Disqus, Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account. This means spambots have no way to access your website’s default commenting system, almost entirely eliminating spam as a potential issue.

We won’t talk about them here, but Disqus also gives you ways to monetize your content, promote your content, and automatically adapts its discussion system for mobile devices. You want your visitors to easily interact with your site no matter where they are, don’t you?

One great thing about Disqus is that they offer a slew of integration options, including native plugins for popular content management systems and platforms like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Disqus can also update the comments in real-time, allowing discussions to flow fluidly, which can increase the amount of time people spend on your website.

There are other, similar solutions to Disqus, which we’ll take a look at another time. For now, just know that the default commenting systems can easily be replaced with something far more dynamic that can solve some real issues your for blog!

The 2010 OlympicsÂ are looming closer and closer each day which will be hosted in both Vancouver and Whistler. While watching the news I was shocked to hear that in the 2010 gamesÂ they would not be allowing female ski jumpers.

I did a bit of research to find out why and the only reason put forth so far is that they say the woman are not skilled enough to jump at an Olympic level. To me that seems like putting the cart before the horse. How would you know what the Olympic level is if you don’t have them included in the Olympics.

We have seen more companies come online last year with a grid, cloud, cluster technologies for shared hosting. ThisÂ services consists of multiple Apache servers, a few database and email servers. Their is usually a load balance and failover component to it as well. Some of the providers do this through hardware where others do it through software.

I have been tracking up time for all of these new services and their support notices. So far the service does not appear to be a production ready service from the indication of the downtime and issues pushed out through support notices.

One of the problems I have with Clusters in a shared environment is that they create a large single point of failure which can kill your entire business. Where separate servers in separate data centers means you do not have one single point of failure.

I think that Clusters for shared hosting is still a ways away before it makes sense.

Today I went to fill up and found the cost to be 108.5. I was angry and decided to only put in $20 instead of filling up. I’m sure my passive aggressive way of only paying $20 will not affect the gas companies but I know I felt better.

How does the current gas prices make you feel?

One of the main reasons I was angry is because you see things like this gas companies investor relations pressÂ releases…

Net earnings from continuing operations were $845 million in the second quarter of 2007, compared with $472 million in the same period of 2006.

I am all for making money and free enterprise.Â There are lots of companies that make this much revenue year after year. My only concern is that gas is an integral part of our society and greed can cause greater social issues.

Although at what level areÂ gas companiesÂ hurting society by doubling earnings year after year?